If 4G speeds of 400Mbps become common there are going to be some very happy media streamers, at least until the bill comes in. In a proof of concept test Huawei EE and Qualcomm demonstrated a 4G LTE carrier aggregated connection in Wembley stadium which hit peak speeds of 400Mbps and should provide most attendees of events at Wembley with speeds hitting up to 150Mbps. The carrier will use the existing 4G LTE network, only tweaking was needed to increase the speeds as opposed to a new standard and so any phone capable of connecting to LTE should be able to take advantage of the speed increase. Check out The Inquirer for more information.

"HUAWEI, EE AND QUALCOMM have demonstrated a blink-and-you-missed-it 4G network at Wembley Stadium that achieved speeds of 400Mbps."

Professional and amateur players of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft can compete for a share of the $25,000 prize pool and other perks, hosted by NVIDIA. Once the pool of players are whittled down to the sixteen invited pros and the top sixteen non-professionals, they will compete in a playoff format. The 32 players at that stage will each receive an NVIDIA Shield Tablet, the top 16 will receive money, and the top eight will get Blizzard World Championship qualifier points may either start their career or get them even closer to being invited to the autumn finals.

Breaking down the above into a little more detail:

Prize Money

Qualification Points

Shield Tablet

1st Place

$10,000

100

✔

2nd Place

$5,000

50

✔

3rd & 4th Place

$1,500

Some

✔

5th - 8th Place

$750

Some

✔

9th - 16th Place

$500

-

✔

17th - 32nd Place

-

-

✔

NVIDIA will be streaming the event as a four-hour event every week, which consist of group-stage highlights. Registration will close on March 19th at noon (EST). The actual playoffs will take place on May 30th and May 31st, also streamed on NVIDIA's Twitch channel.

Corsair designed the Carbide Series Air 240 High Airflow for small motherboards but left enough room to fit fair sized add in cards and coolers. The case is 397 x 260 x 320mm (15.6 x 10 x 12.6") and will hold GPUs up to 290 mm in length and a cooler of up to 120mm as well as a full sized ATX PSU. [H]ard|OCP installed two GTX 280's with no issues and had no problems installing several popular AiO watercoolers either. Even with just air cooling it would seem that Corsair's Direct Airflow Path is much more than just a marketing gimmick and kept the components at reasonable temperatures even after heavy loads. It certainly earned the Gold Award it received and for less than $100 it deserves to be on your short list of tiny cases to consider purchasing.

"Are you in the market of a case for that new Mini-ITX or MicroATX PC build? Corsair today shows off its Carbide Series Air 240 High Airflow MicroATX and Mini-ITX PC Case. It's big, it's black, and it will remind you the the Borg. OK, maybe it is not that big, but big enough to allow mATX fans plenty of room for cooling and hot dual GPUs."

As a preview to announcements and releases being made at both Mobile World Congress (MWC) and the Game Developers Summit (GDC) next week, Imagination Technologies took the wraps off of a new graphics product they are calling a "super-GPU". The PowerVR GT7900 is the new flagship GPU as a part of its Series7XT family that is targeting a growing category called "affordable game consoles." Think about the Android-powered set-top devices like the Ouya or maybe Amazon's Kindle TV.

PowerVR breaks up its GPU designs into unified shading clusters (USCs) and the GT7900 has 16 of them for a total of 512 ALU cores. Imagination has previously posted a great overview of its USC architecture design and how you can compare its designs to other GPUs on the market. Imagination wants to claim that the GT7900 will offer "PC-class gaming experiences" though that is as ambiguous as the idea of a work load of a "console-level game." But with rated peak performance levels hitting over 800 GFLOPS in FP32 and 1.6 TFLOPS in FP16 (half-precision) this GPU does have significant theoretical capability.

PowerVR GT7900

Tegra X1

Vendor

Imagination Technologies

NVIDIA

FP32 ALUs

512

256

FP32 GFLOPS

800

512

FP16 GFLOPS

1600

1024

GPU Clock

800 MHz

1000 MHz

Process Tech

16nm FinFET+

20nm TSMC

Imagination also believes that PowerVR offers a larger portion of its peak performance for a longer period of time than the competition thanks to the tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR) approach that has been "refined over the years to deliver unmatched efficiency."

The FP16 performance number listed above is useful as an extreme power savings option where the half-precision compute operates in a much more efficient manner. A fair concern is how many applications, GPGPU or gaming, actually utilize the FP16 data type but having support for it in the GT7900 allows developers to target it.

Other key features of the GT7900 include support for OpenGL ES 3.1 + AEP (Android Extension Pack), hardware tessellation and ASTC LDR and HDR texture compression standards. The GPU also can run in a multi-domain virtualization mode that would allow multiple operating systems to run in parallel on a single platform.

Imagination believes that this generation of PowerVR will "usher a new era of console-like gaming experiences" and will showcase a new demo at GDC called Dwarf Hall.

I'll be at GDC next week and have already setup a meeting with Imagination to talk about the GT7900 so I can have some hands on experiences to report back with soon. I am continually curious about the market for these types of high-end "mobile" GPUs with the limited market that the Android console market currently addresses. Imagination does claim that the GT7900 is beating products with performance levels as high as the GeForce GT 730M discrete GPU - no small feat.

Just a quick question regarding DirectX 12. I’m planning to buy a new graphics card soon but I want a DirectX 12 card for all the fancy new features so I’m considering either the GTX 970 or 980, the question I have is are these real DirectX 12 cards? Since DirectX 12 development is still ongoing how can these cards be fully DirectX 12 complaint?

In just under a week SIM card maker Gemalto claims to have done a complete security audit of their systems in 85 different countries and reports that "its office networks were compromised, the servers holding the SIM card encryption keys weren't." This is a record worthy of Guinness as most security audits take months or years to complete and the findings tend to discuss probabilities, not absolute certainties. As you might expect The Register and security experts everywhere are doubtful of the claims from a company that did not even know if was compromised less than a week ago that the UK based GCHQ and USA based NSA are unable to compromise your SIM cards encryption when they have the keys in hand. It has not been a good week for anyone who thinks about security.

"Six days ago Gemalto, the world's largest SIM card manufacturer, was told that back in 2010 it had been ransacked by NSA and GCHQ hackers. Today the company gave itself the all-clear: no encryption keys, used to secure phone calls from eavesdroppers, were stolen, it claims."

Quiet, Efficient Gaming

The last few weeks have been dominated by talk about the memory controller of the Maxwell based GTX 970. There are some very strong opinions about that particular issue, and certainly NVIDIA was remiss on actually informing consumers about how it handles the memory functionality of that particular product. While that debate rages, we have somewhat lost track of other products in the Maxwell range. The GTX 960 was released during this particular firestorm and, while it also shared the outstanding power/performance qualities of the Maxwell architecture, it is considered a little overpriced when compared to other cards in its price class in terms of performance.

It is easy to forget that the original Maxwell based product to hit shelves was the GTX 750 series of cards. They were released a year ago to some very interesting reviews. The board is one of the first mainstream cards in recent memory to have a power draw that is under 75 watts, but can still play games with good quality settings at 1080P resolutions. Ryan covered this very well and it turned out to be a perfect gaming card for many pre-built systems that do not have extra power connectors (or a power supply that can support 125+ watt graphics cards). These are relatively inexpensive cards and very easy to install, producing a big jump in performance as compared to the integrated graphics components of modern CPUs and APUs.

The GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti have proven to be popular cards due to their overall price, performance, and extremely low power consumption. They also tend to produce a relatively low amount of heat, due to solid cooling combined with that low power consumption. The Maxwell architecture has also introduced some new features, but the major changes are to the overall design of the architecture as compared to Kepler. Instead of 192 cores per SMK, there are now 128 cores per SMM. NVIDIA has done a lot of work to improve performance per core as well as lower power in a fairly dramatic way. An interesting side effect is that the CPU hit with Maxwell is a couple of percentage points higher than Kepler. NVIDIA does lean a bit more on the CPU to improve overall GPU power, but most of this performance hit is covered up by some really good realtime compiler work in the driver.

Asus has taken the GTX 750 Ti and applied their STRIX design and branding to it. While there are certainly faster GPUs on the market, there are none that exhibit the power characteristics of the GTX 750 Ti. The combination of this GPU and the STRIX design should result in an extremely efficient, cool, and silent card.

WZor, a group in Russia that somehow acquires many Windows leaks, has just published screenshots of Windows 10 Build 10022 and Windows Server Build 9926. As far as we can tell, not much has changed. We see neither an upgraded Cortana nor a look at the Spartan browser. The build is not labeled “Microsoft Confidential” though, which makes people believe that it is (or was) intended for public release -- maybe as early as this week.

Honestly, I do not see anything different from the provided screenshots apart from the incremented version number. It is possible that this build addresses back-end issues, leaving the major new features for BUILD in late April. Leaked notes (also by WZor) for build 10014, called an “Early Partner Drop”, suggest that version was designed for hardware and software vendors. Perhaps the upcoming preview build is designed to give a platform for third-parties to develop updates ahead of Microsoft releasing the next (or second-next) big build?

Intel is updating its Atom processor branding to better communicate the expected performance and experience customers can expect from their Intel powered mobile device. In fact, the new branding specifies three tiers. Atom processors will soon come in Atom x3, x5, and x7 flavors. This branding scheme is similar to the Core processor branding using the i3, i5, and i7 labels.

The Atom x3, x5, and x7 chips are low power, efficient processors for battery powered devices and sit below the Core M series which in turn are below the Core i3, i5, and i7 processors. The following infographic shows off the new branding though Intel does not reveal any specific details about these new Atom chips (we will hopefully know more after Mobile World Congress). Of course, Atom x3 chips will reside in smartphones with x5 and x7 chips powering tablets and budget convertibles. The x7 brand represents the flagship processors of the Atom line.

The new branding will begin with the next generation of Atom chips which should include Cherry Trail, the 14nm successor to Bay Trail featuring four x86 Airmont cores and Gen 8 Intel graphics. Cherry Trail (Cherryview SoC) will be used in all manner of mobile devices from entry level 8"+ tablets to larger notebooks and convertibles. It appears that Intel will use Moorefield (a quad core 14nm refresh of Merrifield) through 2015 for smartphones though road maps seem to indicate that Intel's budget SoFIA SoC will also launch this year. SoFIA and Moorefield processors should fall under the Atom x3 brand with the higher powered and higher clocked Cherry Trail chips will use the Atom x5 and x7 monikers.

Update: Currency exchange rates have been corrected. I'm sorry for any confusion!

Intel Foundation is selling off its remaining stake in UK-based Imagination Technologies (IMG.LN). According to JP Morgan, Intel is selling off 13.4 million shares (4.9% of Imagination Technologies) for 245 GBp each. Once all shares are sold, Intel will gross just north of $50.57 Million USD.

Imagination Technologies' PowerVR Rogue Series 6XT GPU is used in Apple's A8-series chips.

Intel first invested in Imagination Technologies back in October of 2006 in a deal to gain access to the company’s PowerVR graphics IP portfolio. Since then, Intel has been slowly moving away from PowerVR graphics in favor of it’s own internal HD graphics GPUs. (Further, Intel sold off 10% of its IMG.LN stake in June of last year.) Even Intel’s low cost Atom line of SoCs has mostly moved to Intel GPUs with the exception of the mobile Merrifield and Moorefield” smartphone/tablet SoCs.

The expansion of Intel’s own graphics IP combined with Imagination Technologies acquisition of MIPS are reportedly the “inevitable” reasons for the sale. According to The Guardian, industry analysts have speculated that, as it stands, Intel is a minor customer of Imagination Technologies at less than 5% for graphics (a licensing agreement signed this year doesn’t rule out PowerVR graphics permanently despite the sale). Imagination Technologies still has a decent presence in the mobile (ARM-based) space with customers including Apple, MediaTek, Rockchip, Freescale, and Texas Instruments.

Currently, the company’s stock price is sitting at 258.75 GBp (~$3.99 USD) which seems to indicate that the Intel sell off news was “inevitable” and was already priced in or simply does not have investors that concerned.

What do you think about the sale? Where does this leave Intel as far as graphics goes? Will we see Intel HD Graphics scale down to smartphones or will the company go with a PowerVR competitor? Would Intel really work with ARM’s Mali, Qualcomm’s Adreno, or Samsung’s rumored custom GPU cores? On that note, an Intel powered smartphone with NVIDIA Tegra graphics would be amazing (hint, hint Intel!)

Dell's Venue 8 7000 tablet sports an 8.4" 2560x1600 OLED display and is powered by the Moorefield based Atom Z3580 SOC, 2GB LPDDR3-1600 with 16GB internal of internal storage with up to a 512GB Micro SD card supported. Even more impressive is that The Tech Report had no issues installing apps or moving files to the SD card with ES File Explorer, unlike many Android devices that need certain programs to reside on the internal storage media. Like Ryan, they had a lot of fun with the RealSense Camera and are looking forward to the upgrade to Lollipop support. Check out The Tech Report's opinion of this impressive Android tablet right here.

"Dell's Venue 8 7000 is the thinnest tablet around, and that's not even the most exciting thing about it. This premium Android slate packs a Moorefield-based Atom processor with quad x86 cores, a RealSense camera that embeds 3D depth data into still images, and a staggeringly beautiful OLED display that steals the show. Read on for our take on a truly compelling tablet."

That's right, for those of you who pre-ordered Homeworld Remastered and for anyone that pops by Steam to purchase it, your productivity is in for a serious hit as you try to guide your fleet to a new homeworld and then defend it. For those lucky and old enough to have played through it originally you will find the look vastly improved and from what Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN and other reviewers have found you will also love the improved interface. For those who have not had the pleasure of playing through these two games before, the $33 investment is more than worth it, especially with improved multiplayer coming in the near future. Check out the videos and overview of the poster child for revamped legacy games here.

You will have to take a break this Saturday though, as the Fragging Frogs Virtual LAN party #9 kicks off at 10AM ET and will end when the last frog drops. You can check out the official thread in the forums right here to get all the information you need to participate. AMD and other mystery sponsors will be giving away prizes to those who log into and participate in the TeamSpeak channels; not to mention it is the best way to chat in game and in the general lobby. You can also check out the list of games that will be played as well as links to the mods and patches you will need, please download and install them before Saturday to maximize your playing time. See you there!

"In terms of strategy games which ‘need’ remastering, Homeworld was probably somewhere at the bottom of the list. But in terms of strategy games which really, truly benefit from remastering – well, this is a chart-topper."

This has been a bad week for the secure socket layer and the news just keeps getting worse. Comodo provides around one out of every three SSL certs currently in use as they have, until now, had a stirling reputation and were a trusted provider. It turns out that this reputation may not be deserved seeing as how their Internet Security 2014 product ships with an application called Adtrustmedia PrivDog, which is enabled by default. Not only does this app install a custom root CA certificate which intercepts connections to websites to be able to insert customized ads like SuperFish does it can also turn invalid HTTPS certificates into valid ones. That means that an attacker can use PrivDog to spoof your banks SSL cert, redirect you to a fake page and grab your credentials, while all the time your browser reports a valid and secure connection to the site.

The only good news from The Register's article is that this specific vulnerability is only present in PrivDog versions 3.0.96.0 and 3.0.97.0 and so has limited distribution. The fact that this indicates the entire SSL certificate model is broken and even those who create the certs to assure your security feel that inserting a man in the middle attack into their software does not contravene their entire reason for existing is incredibly depressing.

The yearly gaming mecca known as QuakeCon, featuring the biggest BYOC (bring your own computer) LAN in the great state of Texas, is set to kick-off starting July 23 through the 26. What you didn't know is that the QuakeCon team announced the registration dates for the event. Like last year, all pre-registration spots in the BYOC will be pay-for only with no First-Come-First-Served spots available.

This year, there will be a total of five registration rounds offered:

BYOC Select-a-Seat with UAC Command Center Seating

32 packages, $500 per package

Wednesday, March 4 at 7pm CST / 8PM EST

BYOC Select-a-Seat with QuakeCon done Quick

300 packages, $175 per package

Wednesday, March 11 at 7pm CST / 8PM EST

BYOC Select-a-Seat + Swag Pack

500 packages, $170 per package

Wednesday, March 18 at 7pm CST / 8PM EST

BYOC Select-a-Seat

1600 packages, $55 per package

Wednesday, March 25 at 7pm CST / 8PM EST

Swag Pack

50 packages, $125 per package

Wednesday, April 1 at 7pm CST / 8PM EST

If you a familiar with the QuakeCon pay-for packaging strategies, most of the packages look familiar. The newest package offering is the UAC Command Center Seating package, featuring a VIP seat in the NOC with direct access for your system to the backbone and guaranteeing you the fastest network access at the event.

While it is utterly inconceivable that Josh might have missed something in his look at Carrizo, that hasn't stopped certain Canadians from talking about Gila County, Arizona. AMD's upcoming processor launch is a little more interesting than just another Phenom II launch, especially for those worried about power consumption. With Adaptive Voltage and Frequency Scaling the new Excavator based chips will run very well at the sub-15W per core pair range which is perfect for POS, airplane entertainment and even in casinos. The GPU portion speaks to those usage scenarios though you can't expect an R9 295 at that wattage. Check out Hardware Canucks' coverage right here.

"AMD has been working hard on their mobile Carrizo architecture and they're now releasing some details about these Excavator architecture-equipped next generation APUs."

Project Lead: Joris-Jan van ‘t Land

Thanks to Ian Comings, guest writer from the PC Perspective Forums who conducted the interview of Bohemia Interactive's Joris-Jan van ‘t Land. If you are interested in learning more about ArmA 3 and hanging out with some PC gamers to play it, check out the PC Perspective Gaming Forum!

I recently got the chance to send some questions to Bohemia Interactive, a computer game development company based out of Prague, Czech Republic, and a member of IDEA Games. Bohemia Interactive was founded in 1999 by CEO Marek Španěl, and it is best known for PC gaming gems like Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, The ArmA series, Take On Helicopters, and DayZ. The questions are answered by ArmA 3's Project Lead: Joris-Jan van ‘t Land.

PC Perspective: How long have you been at Bohemia Interactive?

VAN ‘T LAND: All in all, about 14 years now.

PC Perspective: What inspired you to become a Project Lead at Bohemia Interactive?

VAN ‘T LAND: During high school, it was pretty clear to me that I wanted to work in game development, and just before graduation, a friend and I saw a first preview for Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis in a magazine. It immediately looked amazing to us; we were drawn to the freedom and diversity it promised and the military theme. After helping run a fan website (Operation Flashpoint Network) for a while, I started to assist with part-time external design work on the game (scripting and scenario editing). From that point, I basically grew naturally into this role at Bohemia Interactive.

PC Perspective: What part of working at Bohemia Interactive do you find most satisfying? What do you find most challenging?

VAN ‘T LAND: The amount of freedom and autonomy is very satisfying. If you can demonstrate skills in some area, you're welcome to come up with random ideas and roll with them. Some of those ideas can result in official releases, such as Arma 3 Zeus. Another rewarding aspect is the near real-time connection to those people who are playing the game. Our daily Dev-Branch release means the work I do on Monday is live on Tuesday. Our own ambitions, on the other hand, can sometimes result in some challenges. We want to do a lot and incorporate every aspect of combat in Arma, but we're still a relatively small team. This can mean we bite off more than we can deliver at an acceptable level of quality.

PC Perspective: What are some of the problems that have plagued your team, and how have they been overcome?

VAN ‘T LAND: One key problem for us was that we had no real experience with developing a game in more than one physical location. For Arma 3, our team was split over two main offices, which caused quite a few headaches in terms of communication and data synchronization. We've since had more key team members travel between the offices more frequently and improved our various virtual communication methods. A lot of work has been done to try to ensure that both offices have the latest version of the game at any given time. That is not always easy when your bandwidth is limited and games are getting bigger and bigger.

Vertical mice sometimes help those with issues with their cubital or carpal tunnels by relieving pressure due to repetitive arm and wrist movement. They have been around for a while but do not often get reviewed which is why it might be worth checking out eTeknix today. The Adesso E10 is wireless which is relatively uncommon un this type of mouse as is the DPI switch. In addition it has 4 buttons and a mouse wheel so it could still serve as a gaming mouse, at least for right handed gamers who prefer this style of mouse. Check it out if your mousing fingers get numb while you are sitting at your computer.

"The peripheral market is booming, there’s a huge range of products with a wide range of features available between each device, so finding something suitable for your needs shouldn’t be too difficult. Naturally, not all products are created equally and some are designed for a more niche part of the market than others, such as the iMouse E10 which we have in for review today."

Tracking your smartphones location via aggregate battery usage is not the most efficient or accurate method but it can be done and Samsung (and others) have not provided a switch which makes that particular data private. Researchers have shown that by tracking the battery drain of the 3G cellular radio on the battery one can determine distance from the cellular base station the phone is connected to and a coarse location based on interference environmental factors such as buildings which partially block the signal. It is only a very coarse locator but does give better information than just the base station the phone is connected to and as we are creatures of habit it allows tracking normal patterns of movement. This is nowhere near as accurate as GPS tracking and does require a bit of work to pull off but as battery usage and levels are sent by the phone in the clear with no method of preventing that it should cause some privacy concerns for users. You can read the research paper (in PDF) by following the link from The Inquirer.

"SCIENTISTS have warned of a new smartphone risk after discovering that battery power can be used to track a person's movements."

Followers of PC Perspective have likely seen a pair of stories previewing the upcoming performance and features of USB 3.1. First we got our hands on the MSI X99A Gaming 9 ACK motherboard and were able to run through our very first hands-on testing with USB 3.1 hardware. The motherboard had built-in USB 3.1 support and a device that was configured with a RAID-0 of Intel SSD 730 Series drives.

Performance was astounding for incredibly early implementations, reaching as high as 835 MB/s!

In that last article I theorized that it would be some time before we got our hands on retail USB 3.1 hardware but it appears I wasn't giving the industry enough credit. ASUS passed us a list of incoming devices along with release schedules. There are 27 devices scheduled to be released before the end of April and ~35 by the middle of the year.

The product categories are mostly dominated by the likes of the a USB 3.1 to 2.5-in adapter; that would be useful but you aren't going to top out the performance of the USB 3.1 with a single 2.5-in SATA device. Iomaster has one listed as a "USB 3.1 to MSATA & M2 SSD enclosure" which could be more interesting - does it accept PCI Express M.2 SSDs?

Minerva Innovation has a couple of interesting options, all listed with pairs of mSATA or M.2 ports, two with Type-C connections. What we don't know based on this data is if it supports PCIe M.2 SSDs or SATA only and if it supports RAID-0.

A couple more list dual SATA ports which might indicate that we are going to see multiple hard drives / SSDs over a single USB 3.1 connection but without RAID support. That could be another way to utilize the bandwidth of USB 3.1 in a similar way to how we planned to use Thunderbolt daisy chaining.

We don't have pricing yet, but I don't think USB 3.1 accessories will be significantly more expensive than what USB 3.0 devices sell for. So, does this list of accessories make you more excited to upgrade your system for USB 3.1?

AMD Details Carrizo Further

Some months back AMD introduced us to their “Carrizo” product. Details were slim, but we learned that this would be another 28 nm part that has improved power efficiency over its predecessor. It would be based on the new “Excavator” core that will be the final implementation of the Bulldozer architecture. The graphics will be based on the latest iteration of the GCN architecture as well. Carrizo would be a true SOC in that it integrates the southbridge controller. The final piece of information that we received was that it would be interchangeable with the Carrizo-L SOC, which is a extremely low power APU based on the Puma+ cores.

A few months later we were invited by AMD to their CES meeting rooms to see early Carrizo samples in action. These products were running a variety of applications very smoothly, but we were not informed of speeds and actual power draw. All that we knew is that Carrizo was working and able to run pretty significant workloads like high quality 4K video playback. Details were yet again very scarce other than the expected timeline of release, the TDP ratings of these future parts, and how it was going to be a significant jump in energy efficiency over the previous Kaveri based APUs.

AMD is presenting more information on Carrizo at the ISSCC 2015 conference. This information dives a little deeper into how AMD has made the APU smaller, more power efficient, and faster overall than the previous 15 watt to 35 watt APUs based on Kaveri. AMD claims that they have a product that will increase power efficiency in a way not ever seen before for the company. This is particularly important considering that Carrizo is still a 28 nm product.